I was entrusted with the care and feeding of a Sinar Monorail 4×5 Large Format Field…

I was entrusted with the care and feeding of a Sinar Monorail 4×5 Large Format Field Camera and darkroom compliment. Basically, it's mine to use, not mine to sell.

I need to remodel my basement bathroom a bit in order to seal off the light so I can use it as a dark room. I am waiting for the water heater to finish dying before I do that. It's halfway there… but that's a different story.

On to this story.

I made a film holder for my cell phone for the big camera. I think it's the first time a cell phone has been loaded into one of these cameras like a piece a

I was hoping to get the camera focus and the film focus in the exact same spot. I am close, but not quite right on my first try. Gives me something to fiddle with when I print the next iteration.

Basically I have a cell phone case with a small lens embedded in it that allows a cell phone to capture a very small portion of the 4×5 image area on the Sinar camera.

This thing is a powerful macro lens! It captures an area about the size of a quarter from 7 feet away.

The girls LOVE the camera. It’s the kind that is shown on cartoons, so of course it’s the bestest camera ever!

Cell Phone ‘film’ for the Sinar large format camera. This is a 3d printed ‘cell phone case’ that is also a film holder for the old-school Field Camera.

Over 7 feet. I am getting about 2X life size on the camera screen from 7 feet away. That’s just crazy to me!

A couple of shots of me hand-holding the cell phone with the CDROM laser lens to the camera lens through the Sinar camera at a box in the kitchen. This is a soda box at about 20 feet. Some SERIOUS ZOOMAGE going on here.

This is what the cell phone sees mounted to the back of a Sinar monorail 4×5 large format field camera. The cell phone can’t really focus on anything in particular and sees a lot of the inside of the camera.

With the CD-ROM laser lens installed, the cell phone seems to want to work ‘right’ as far as the Sinar camera is concerned. You can get some motions out of the camera and the cell phone doesn’t seem to want to loose the image.

This is looking at a computer speaker at about 4 foot away. That is a little brass screw.

You can see that the cell phone can see some of the CD-ROM lens and gives that weird circle in the lower right of this photo. The image is actually upside down, in true field camera fashion.

I just love the texture and lens aberrations that this arrangement produces.

I modeled a 4×5 film holder in openscad and printed it to make sure I had it right. https://github.com/creuzerm/openscad-projects/tree/master/Sinar%204×5%20Monorail%20Large%20Format%20Camera

Here I am printing a 4×5 film holder cell phone case with a spot for a CDROM laser lens.

This is the CD-ROM laser lens installed into the 4×5 film holder cell phone case.

My 2 options that I’ve made for connecting a camera to a camera. I can bolt up a 35mm or a cell phone now. Next, I think I want to make a flatbed scanner adapter to pull full frame images off of the Sinar 4×5 Large Format camera.

These are the 3 options I have for loading ‘film’ into the Sinar.

I set up this quick ‘studio’ in the laBOREtory so I could take some photos of the flowers.